BROODING 41 
should be fed without fail until the chicks 
are four weeks old. In fact, rather than omit 
this item of their diet the poultryman can 
profitably go to the extent of buying whole 
milk, skimming the cream (using it in the 
house), souring the skim milk, and feeding 
this sour skim milk to the chicks. There is 
no feed that will give chicks as good a start 
as milk. Chicks fed on milk will grow faster 
and more uniformly, will suffer materially 
less mortality, and will exhibit fewer runts or 
poor chicks. They will reach the broiler 
age much sooner and, therefore, will be 
worth more, because during the summer the 
broiler prices drop rapidly and the sooner one 
gets his broilers on the market the more 
profit there is in the business. 
Outdoor Exercise. Every effort should 
be made to get the chicks out onto the 
ground by the time they are eight or nine 
days old. Small, portable yards made of 
one-foot-wide inch-mesh wire, nailed onto 
two-inch strips ten or twelve feet long, make 
good yards. They are easy to step over and 
are plenty high enough to confine small 
chicks. 
